in august 2011, president obama said he must step aside. why do you think that happened, because that may have attempted to some of the problems we have had on syria policy? >> they completely misread iran and russia's commitment to keeping assad in power. when you have intelligence providers to assad, the leverage that gave him and staying power was limited. i think both of those were not factored in. if you look at it from recent history lesson here, when you look at what happened in libya, you can see all the formulations of why he was going to go quickly. they took that, plopped it over in serious and said it was going to be syria. you have the same elements happening in serious that you had in libya with that huge exception of this commitment of iran not to let it go, and the russians cannot let it go. they needed a warm water port and it was their last toehold in the middle east. they ramped up their ability to protect assad and to try to at least increase the ability of the syrian regular army forces, the military forces in a way tha